By Mike Hashimoto
The Dallas Morning News
No matter whom we supported for president, at least we were spared the sight of Donald Trump marching down Fifth Avenue, chanting and waving a scrawled #NotMyPresident cardboard sign.
Oh, we’d get something like that, just without Trump or his deplorables.
He had horrified a lot of folks in the final debate when he refused to say he would accept the results of his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton. A “chilling pronouncement,” some said. “Unprecedented,” others intoned. Dangerous, evidence of his unfitness, on and on.
His surprisingly decisive victory in the Electoral College tally, despite narrowly losing the popular vote, negated all that. As Trump later promised, he accepted the win and gave a sober, even humbled, address in promising to be a president for “all Americans” and reaching out for unity. Clinton, to her credit, gave her best, most human speech in years, pledging to accept a Trump presidency with an “open mind.”
Even President Barack Obama, a bitter Trump political enemy, graciously received him at the White House and said he was rooting for him to succeed because that would mean America succeeded.
This was classy leadership all around. Really, the best of our political system, especially welcome after the worst of campaigns.
The word must not have reached the streets.
Anti-Trump protests sprouted across the country. A few popped up on election night in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. They also spread to Portland, Ore.; Seattle; Philadelphia; Oakland, Calif.; Richmond, Va.; Atlanta; Omaha, Neb.; and Kansas City, Mo.
Dallas protesters were largely peaceful, which wasn’t the case in Oakland and Portland. There, business windows were bashed in, law enforcement vehicles were trashed, small fires burned in the streets and police officers were injured trying to rein in the self-absorbed spasms of sour grapes.
At the peak of Portland’s chaos Thursday night, police decided some threshold had been crossed: “Due to extensive criminal and dangerous behavior, protest is now considered a riot,” Portland police tweeted. “Crowd has been advised.”
Trump would tweet that “professional protesters, incited by the media” were involved. A Portland activist, speaking to The Washington Post, did not entirely disagree.
“They’re not coming to show solidarity, they’re coming because they know there’s going to be a big crowd,” said Teressa Raiford, a community organizer in Portland. “They don’t respect our movement.”
Police noted that peaceful protesters tried to stop the less-peaceful, but “they’re not having any luck,” said Pete Simpson, a department spokesman.
All of this had the effect of persuading roughly no one to the protesters’ point of view, in the grand tradition of Occupy This or Black Lives That. Whatever legitimate point one has usually gets buried under all the stuff you tore up.
Or, as noted law professor Jonathan Turley put it, “We’re raising a generation of emotional hemophiliacs. If legal or political things don’t go your way, if something upsets you, you have a modern version of the vapors.”
These protesters were well within their rights to be sad, angry, frustrated or even terrified at the thought of a Trump presidency, although that last bit seems an overreaction. Speaking out publicly is an American tradition. Obviously, that right stops at the point of public destruction.
And hysteria over the protests, even with the violence, was reasonably muted, which we can bet would not have been the case had it been Trump supporters marching en masse through downtown streets, many armed and dressed for battle. “Kill Clinton” spray-painted on buildings or profane anti-Clinton signs might have drawn a bit more outrage, at least from some.
I’m also not remembering those property-destroying anti-Obama marches or tea party rallies.
Shouldn’t it concern us that some Americans refuse to accept the results of a free and fair election? Trump was wrong to say he wouldn’t; aren’t the #NotMyPresident protesters equally guilty? Reputable news sources were full of high-minded admonitions of Trump, portrayed as some banana-republic autocrat for refusing to accept the people’s will.
Of course, that was when those news sources, like so many of these protesters, assumed the people’s will would point in a different direction. Protesters now say their faith in democracy is shaken, that they fear for themselves in Trump’s America. Anyone have a safe space to offer them?
Yet they had to know — didn’t they? — that tens of millions of Americans would vote for Trump, win or lose. His total of nearly 60 million votes came in just short of Mitt Romney’s 61 million in 2012. Clinton, too, underperformed to her party’s previous nominee. Obama had about 66 million votes in 2012, or nearly 7 million more than Clinton.
All told, of about 231.5 million eligible voters, only 131.7 million bothered to show up. That’s a lot of potential votes left on the table, votes Clinton could have used in states like Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Michigan.
Or those no-shows just as easily could have broken for Trump, since we don’t know who they might have been.
That’s the thing about democracy — or our democratic republic, to be precise. You are promised a level-playing-field chance but are not guaranteed an outcome. As in a criminal trial, a verdict that doesn’t go your way is not unfair, just the side of democracy that you must accept like an adult.
Mike Hashimoto is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. Readers may email him at mhashimoto@dallasnews.com.
